[2024] How To Fix Facebook Ads Attribution After IOS 14

Raise your hands if you’ve been terrified looking at your Ads Manager one day after the campaign sets in. Your newborn Shopify store has witnessed no sales from Ads - the only traffic source you got. Your confidence sinks. But did you know that IOS 14 Apple ATT prompt killed the Ads Manager accuracy? If you don’t want a floppy conversion report to hurt your business in silence, let’s bring the situation to light and get a coping mechanism asap!

What is Facebook Ads attribution?

“Attribution” is how Facebook gives credit to an ad you run. To put this in perspective, it’s the mechanism behind which Facebook decides what appears in the results column. This is so you can determine where the dollars will go and when to kill an unprofitable ad.

How Facebook Ads Attribution work

By default, a Facebook ad gets credit for a conversion if a targeted Facebook user clicks your ad and converts within 7 days or views your ad without clicking and converts within the same day.

That’s what you often hear: 7-day click and 1-day view attribution window.

But you can actually switch to a 1-day click if you’d like.

How to set up the attribution window

You can actually find the setting here in the ads set level when you launch a new campaign:

Choosing this window will eventually tell Facebook 2 things:

• How Facebook distributes your ads
• How it shows the report for campaign performance

Put simply, if you choose 1-day click, Facebook will pivot to target people most likely to convert the same day of clicking. Ads Manager stats will also follow suit: Only the conversions that happen within the same day of the ad click will be reported.

Why do you need an accurate Ads Manager report?

Accurate tracking is every marketer’s dream.

Bad tracking, under-reporting, or over-reporting is going to cloud your judgment. Turning off the wrong ads, or scaling the wrong ads are both going to end up in low ROAS.

On the competition side, think of it like this:

You’re acquiring new customers from just one or two channels (Facebook/TikTok) and you do tracking wrong. How are you going the fuel growth and move the needle while your competitors keep thriving campaign after campaign because they have great tracking?

Tracking should tell you where the money will go and return, not leave you for good.

But can you trust on-platform metrics anymore?

What happened to how Facebook reports conversion post-IOS 14

What if most of your customers really buy after 28 days? Your hands are really tied when this happens because there is no way for Facebook to tell you that now.

Well, the fact is, the setting hasn’t always been like that. Before the Apple Ad Tracking Transparency (ATT) dagger, Facebook was able to offer a 28-day click and 7-day view attribution and optimization window.

For years!

We won’t deny that Facebook does a great job at telling you how clicks you get but once people go off the platform, the visibility is limited even with Facebook Pixel and CAPI.

Impacts on Reporting

Shorten attribution window

Sure, no 2 businesses suffer the same way from the shortened window.

But in general you really don’t know whether it’s that they don’t buy, buy late, or are under-reported.

Losing events

Besides, mind the opted-out users. You’ll actually never see their whole conversion path as Facebook will only report on the highest priority event they perform, under Aggregated Events Measurement.

That’s the whole point. The itchy feeling that you are optimizing and getting insights from something not exactly right.

To tell you the truth, not just reporting but also optimization and targeting (eventually how you deliver the ads to the right people) have been greatly affected.

Claim back the long attribution window with Two Owls Facebook Pixel App.

How people have been coping with Ads Manager reporting struggle

Sure, people have looked to extensive solutions like Google Analytics. Basically, what you’ll need is a URL builder and put the tagged link into your ads. But GA might scare you when you’re just started.

When all you need is to view which ads are generating the most revenue, GA could be too much.

Explore the source of truth you own with this simple dashboard that takes 1 min to set up

How to fix your Facebook Conversion reporting fast

Tracking is just the first step. Even though it’s always a work in progress and you’ll never get to see 100% accuracy, it’s a crucial step not to break the bank advertising blindly.

Explore Two Owls which will offer you the source of truth in real-time, with:

• Customizable attribution window (up to 60 days)
• Report on the revenue each campaign, ad sets, and ads bring
• Understand which products are driving the most conversion

All you need to do is to add a trackable link to your Facebook ad

No small business that is struggling to compete for growth should suffer from this tracking rabbit hole and fixing this soon is the top of the agenda for any data-driven marketers.